Em gestão de projetos, temos um tripé essencial para o sucesso de qualquer iniciativa: escopo, tempo e cost. An ill-sized scope affects time and cost, just as a schedule delay can affect the project's cost and scope. Ill-sized costs can completely derail everything planned in the scope and schedule. In other words, one side of the triangle affects the others.
Read also: Cost management in projects – what you need to know?
In today's post, we're going to talk about one of these vertices: time. According to a study by the Standish Group, less than a third of all projects are completed within the estimated deadline.
Are you in this group? As of today, no longer. Follow these tips and ensure project deadlines are met:
Determine the sequence of activities
Expecting your mind to register and organize absolutely all the tasks that need to be accomplished by you and your team is a big risk. Our minds are selective, even more so in times when we have an overload of information arriving constantly.
The best way to start organizing project deadlines is to create a to-do list, ordering them logically. You may have tasks that can be executed concurrently and others that depend on previous activities to begin. It is important to determine these interdependencies by creating a map, also called a network diagram.
There are several types of network diagrams, among the best known are the PERT Chart (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) and Product Data Management (Precedence Diagramming Method).
Both analysis methods allow you to identify project bottlenecks, that is, activities that can compromise progress and lead to delays. This way, you can allocate a longer timeframe for these activities, find ways to reduce the risks of delays, and assign more people to these tasks so they are completed within the estimated deadline.
Identify responsible parties, resources, and deadlines
Each activity in your schedule will have physical and human resources allocated. Knowing exactly what will be needed to complete each task is essential to have everything at hand and avoid delays.
Once that's done, you also need to set deadlines for deliverables. Have a meeting with your team and estimate the time needed for each activity, always considering additional time for each project phase to gain some breathing room during more difficult moments.
Once again, don't rely solely on people's memories or sticky notes stuck to their computers. Management tool will give you greater control over project activities, like signal lights so that you and your team know immediately which activities are behind schedule, which are on the verge, and which still have time to be completed.
Email alerts are a good way to keep everyone focused on project goals and meeting deadlines, something that can very well be done by a technological solution developed for optimizing results.
Monitor team performance
After planning the schedule, estimating activities and deadlines, all you need is to create a mechanism for tracking team performance and meeting deadlines.
Here the resources are varied: you can do simplified management through a Kanban board; with the help of software that displays such information on a control dashboard; or even with a Gantt chart.
In our post “Performance indicators you can't lose sight of when managing projects”Here, you'll find some formulas that help calculate schedule variance and its implications for your project.
Deadlines are meant to be met. A lack of care in this part of project planning can lead to serious consequences for you and your clients, potentially making a project unviable due to loss of time to market, for example. Therefore, use a management system that assists in this process, from estimating the time for each task to be performed to monitoring the planned versus actual progress.
How do you ensure deadlines are met on your projects? Share your experience with us!
